Where Does Google's Hardware Go to Die?

An anonymous reader asks: "I was talking with a co-worker today about how Google is so big, and how they make such great use of commodity hardware to do their business, and one of the topics that came up is what Google does with its old hardware. Google has been around for many years now, they have more machines than any sane person would own, and they are continually expanding. At some stage they have to push out old equipment, either when it starts entering into its MTBF limits or it's been depreciated down. Searching (using Google of course) wasn't particularly fruitful. Has anyone seen where Google's hardware goes when it dies?"

Comments

Re:If it ain't broke, why fix it?

[anthony_dipierro]

You've got a good point there, especially if you think about hard drive space with Gmail. I'm sure Google will keep hold of their hard drives wherever possible to give them more space/more redundancy.

The way hard drives have been getting cheaper and more compact, that doesn't always make economic sense. At some point the cost of storage, cooling, electricity, maintenance, etc. is too much and you're better off using that new machine that can handle 100 times the data for the same overhead costs.

If electricity, rent, air conditioners, and sysadmins were free...